By
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Framed by pictures of colorful fish, leathery sea turtles and endangered Hawaiian monk seals, President Clinton yesterday created the largest U.S. nature preserve - 84 million acres underwater around the northwestern Hawaiian Islands - to help save the coral reefs and wildlife that inhabit the area.
The Pacific Ocean reserve, at 99,500 square nautical miles as large as Florida and Georgia combined, contains nearly 70 percent of the United States' coral reefs, as well as pristine remote islands, atolls and submerged lagoons - "a special place where the sea is a living rainbow," Clinton said.
Despite immediate criticism of the reserve from some in the Hawaiian fishing industry, Clinton said coral reefs support thousands of species of fish and sea life, generate millions in fishing and tourism, protect coastal communities from pounding waves and provide new hope for medical breakthroughs.
"However, the world's reefs are in peril," the president told the National Geographic Society as a projection screen behind him showed constantly changing scenes of ocean wildlife. "Pollution, damage from dynamite fishing, coral poachers, unwise coastal development and global warming have already have killed over 25 percent of the world's reefs. In some areas, such as the Central Indian Ocean, 90 percent of the coral reefs have died, bleached as white as dead bone."
The new Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Coral Reef Reserve encompasses the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge set up by President Theodore Roosevelt.
"He knew then that our natural wonders on land and sea form an integral part of who we are as a people, and that every generation of Americans must do its part to sustain and strengthen this legacy," Clinton said. "Today we do just that, incorporating the refuge he created into a new, vast and wonderful Yellowstone of the sea."
Tammy Leilani Harp, a seventh generation Hawaiian from a family that has long fished in those waters, came to Washington for the announcement and praised Clinton's actions, saying her family and other Hawaiians took only what they needed from the seas and left the rest for another day.
"We must stop destroying what we have or there will be nothing left to pass on when we are dead and gone," she said.
To help protect the reefs, the reserve will ban oil and gas exploration, the dumping of any material and any alternations of the seabed or the coral and most sea life. Clinton's executive order also caps the already limited fishing at recent or current levels.
Some members of the Hawaiian fishing industry opposed creation of the new reserve.
"The president's order should be renamed the 'new Hawaiian Territorial Act' as it gives the great white father in Washington control of Hawaiian resources," said Jim Cook, a long-line fisherman and former chairman of the Western Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Council.
The council is one of eight regional councils established by Congress to regulate the use of waters three to 200 miles off U.S. shores. Its members say the reserve would close all commercial fisheries except bottomfishing in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and would close nearly one-third of the area's bottomfishing grounds.
Nearly half of Hawaii's commercially caught bottomfish - such as opakapaka and onaga (pink and red snapper), and hapuupuu (sea bass) - comes from the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, the council said. Freezing the current fishing levels could hurt the islands' fishing industry, officials said.
"The devil is in the details," said executive director Kitty Simonds. "We would be very concerned if something was done that hurt our fishermen."
Some ocean activists also weren't completely happy with Clinton's declaration.
David Guggenheim of the Center for Marine Conservation said his group wanted Clinton to declare the area a national monument, which would ban fishing completely. ''We didn't get everything we had hoped, but we certainly consider this an important first step,'' he said.
"For thousands of years," Clinton said, "people have risked their lives to master the ocean. Now, suddenly, the ocean's life is at risk. We have the resources and responsibility to rescue the sea, to renew the very oceans that give us life, and thereby to renew ourselves."
